Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Editing Your Photos With Picnik

Whether you have an online business and you would like to make your photos really pop, or you want to enhance your blog photos, or you enjoy photography as a hobby, or you just want to edit your family photos to make you look ultra hot, then you would love to try Picnik. It is a free program that is quite user friendly.

infrared film with yellow matte a signature and logo

Though only the basic edits are free, you still get some neat choices. I edited the same exact photo in this post using only the free tools for examples. Now, for basic editing, I really love Picassa 3 which is totally free does have lots of neat features and easy to use, but Picnik has lots of other features for more "play". You can really acheive the look of vintage photos, holga photography, and the style of film noir and a play on exposure that is just beautiful. Of course, this program is probably a nightmare to the true photographer that has studied and learned their own tricks and uses the lens and darkroom to capture these effects, but this is just for fun!

boost, vingette, 1960's round corners and a touch of film grain

Of course on the free version, you have limited uploads and for more advanced tools like "gritty" (so neat!), and photo editing for people, like eye and teeth whitening, sunless tanning, eye color brightening, red eye reduction, wrinkle softening, airbrushing, mascara highlighter!!, shine reducer... (wish I could get these and a belly roll reducer and a make dinner and do dishes tool in real life!). All of these tools are in the premium package that you have to sign up and pay for, but you can at least try them out (one at a time though) to see if you would like the investment.

touch of black and white, cross process and focal softening

I hope you have fun experimenting with your images. You can give your shop or blog an entire overhaul without ever having to retake photos. Unless your photos are very dark, overexposed, blurry or poorly staged, most can be saved with an artful flair with Picnik.

boost, filmgrain, vignette and orton-ishEdited to add~ as you can see through my photos, the colors have changed drastically. For fun, artful purposes, this is totally acceptable and encouraged! But remember, if you are selling online you need to remember to keep the colors as close as possible to the real thing so that your buyers won't be mislead.

Also, though, on cnet.com (or downloads.com, I think, it's where you go to get free AVG) there is a program you can download called 'photoscape' and it stays on your computer. You can resize all your photos as once through the 'batch editor' (super time saver!) and also through regular 'editor' you can do sooo much more. Almost exactly like picnik, but so many more options. You have 10 options (I think it's ten) for 'antiquing' a photo that makes it look like the 'Thru the View Finder' photography. Seriously, I LOVE this program. I'm not spamming you here, I promise! If you want to check it out, I would be happy to help you figure the basic operation out like a friend did to me. Cause, seriously....this stuff ROCKS!! :) All the beach pics on my page were done with the 'filter' cross process easy.

Okay, will quit gushing about it... If you decide to use it, lemme know and I can walk you through it, though it is soo simple. All the processing is done under 'filters' and there is the 'undo' button, so you can play with them all.